Abstract

LSC, the Linked Science Core Vocabulary,
is a lightweight vocabulary providing terms to enable publishers and researchers to relate things in science to time, space, and themes. More precisely, LSC is designed for describing scientific resources including elements of research, their context, and for interconnecting them. We introduce LSC as an example of building blocks for Linked Science to communicate the linkage between scientific resources in a machine-understandable way. The “core” in the name refers to the fact that LSC only defines the basic terms for science. We argue that the success of Linked Science—or Linked Data in general—lies in interconnected, yet distributed vocabularies that minimize ontological commitments. More specific terms needed by different scientific communities can therefore be introduced as extensions of LSC.
LSC is hosted at LinkedScience.org; please check also other available vocabularies at LinkedScience.org/vocabularies.

This documents specifies the classes and properties introduced by the Linked Science Core Vocabulary.

Status of this document

NOTE:This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document.

This specification is an evolving document. This document may be updated or added to based on implementation experience, but no commitment is made by the authors regarding future updates. This document is generated by combining a machine-readable Linked Science Core Vocabulary Namespace expressed in RDF/XML with a specification template and a set of per-term documents.

3. Descriptions about LSC

The Core LSC definitions presented here are written using a computer language (RDF/OWL) that makes it easy for software to process some basic facts about the terms in the Linked Science Core Vocabulary, and consequently about the things described using LSC.

3.1. Evolution and extension of LSC

The Linked Science Core Vocabulary is identified by the namespace URI "http://linkedscience.org/lsc/ns#".

Revisions and extensions of LSC are conducted through edits to the namespace document, which by convention is published on the Web at the namespace URI.

The properties and types defined here provide some basic concepts for describing information relevant about research. Other vocabularies (e.g. AIISO - Academic Institution Internal Structure Ontology, BIBO - The Bibliographic Ontology, W3C Ontology for Media Resources, the Time Ontology in OWL, the Open Provenance Model Vocabulary, Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies (SPAR), SWAN Ontology etc.) can also be mixed in with LSC terms. LSC is designed to be extended.